One way The Washington Post builds disgust toward Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is quite predictable: seek out Muslims who accuse them of “destabilizing” the self-esteem of Muslim school children.
On the front of Tuesday’s Metro section came an article headlined “Election-Year Lessons: Muslim educators are using presidential candidates’ attack on their faith as a teaching tool.”
Not in The Washington Post: a story on how “Catholic educators are using the Obama administration’s courtroom battles with the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor as a teaching tool.” The Democratic candidates for president were never mentioned in this propaganda exercise.
Post religion reporter (and Harvard grad) Julie Zauzmer exquisitely describes the pain of Muslim children, and how Republican candidates don’t sound like adults:
Among all the parents and teachers struggling to explain this campaign to their children, Muslim Americans have perhaps the hardest job.
What do you tell your child when the Republican front-runner says on TV, “I think Islam hates us”? What do you say when another challenger says police should be patrolling Muslim neighborhoods?
“They are frightened by this language. They’re puzzled by it. It’s destabilizing the emotions of these young children who are trying to fit in and to be proud,” said Salahuddeen Abdul Kareem, who teaches at the Muslim private school Alim Academy in Potomac, Md. “They’re troubled. How can adults act in such a way?”
Educators at Muslim private schools and at mosques across America say they strive to inform students about the election, not shield them from it, even when debate touches frequently on their own religion in a way that might be painful.
Speaking of how "adults act," Kareem is lauded as a "highly respected Washington area educator" in his defense of "Lady Al-Qaeda" by Louis Farrakhan's Final Call website.
In between these "instructional" Zauzmer paragraphs are links to other articles, such as: “The ‘Trump Effect’ is contaminating our kids — and could resonate for years to come,” as well as “Muslims tell Ted Cruz just what they see in #MyMuslimNeighborhood,” and by contrast: “At Baltimore mosque, President Obama tells Muslims: ‘You fit in here’.” Then there’s this one: “Want to see Islam as a religion of love? Just look at the Taj Mahal.”
Then came the part quoting the school children as they attacked Trump and Cruz as racist or disturbing as Zauzmer reports from the Al-Qalam Academy in suburban Springfield, Virginia:
“If we lived in any other time, we wouldn’t have been able to vote because we are women or we are people of skin color. If we lived in any other country, we wouldn’t be able to vote,” said Ramisa Resha, a 14-year-old freshman. One of her classmates applauded, and another softly whooped, “Speeeech!”
After months of watching the campaign closely, the teenage students in this civics class already seemed world-weary. Shortly after Ted Cruz said on the campaign trail that police should be monitoring “Muslim neighborhoods” in the United States, 15-year-old freshman Maryam Mian said, “To me it’s disappointing. It’s not offending anymore.” She’s used to it, she insisted.
When Donald Trump repeated his pledge to prevent all Muslims from entering the country, Mian said she didn’t take it personally. It’s not just Muslims. “He doesn’t like the Spanish people. He doesn’t like black people.”
But Resha said to her, “There are a lot of people who agree with him. That’s pretty disturbing.”
Speaking of disturbing, a 2002 Post article with a very similar poor-Muslims approach reported on how this same Al-Qalam Academy did some indoctrinating of their own:
But students in class also talk about the taunts they face outside the school gates -- being called "terrorist" and "bomber" -- and ask whether Osama bin Laden is simply the victim of such prejudice. Maps of the Middle East hang on classroom walls, but Israel is missing.
Zauzmer skipped right over an obvious point in Resha’s “speech” – that Muslim women and girls in many Muslim countries have no rights. Zauzmer quotes Talib Shareef, an imam at Masjid Muhammad DC, which calls itself “the nation’s mosque,” as telling the children to read America’s founding documents for support -- that's a great idea, but does Islam around the world really revere those ideals? (Zauzmer included nothing about that mosque's adherents including devotees of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, and she could have seen that in a recent Post puff piece by Courtland Milloy on the mosque.)
Any mention of sharia law being at odds with democracy is apparently ignorant crazy talk:
For instance, when then-candidate Ben Carson said a Muslim couldn’t be president without rejecting sharia law, Kareem asked the students how that held up against their own knowledge of Islamic teaching.
“He hasn’t had lesson 101 in sharia law,” Kareem said about Carson. He helped the students reach their own conclusion, that a Muslim could indeed be president.
When the Southern Poverty Law Center polled 2,000 teachers about their students’ impressions of the election, they collected hundreds of accounts of fear and anxiety particularly among Muslim students. One fourth grade teacher wrote in their report, released this month: “One of my students who is Muslim is worried that he will have to wear a microchip identifying him as Muslim.”
In the online story, the SPLC “poll” results go on, about six-year-old kids having to deny they are terrorists, but somehow that didn’t make the newspaper article.
“We had a fifth grade student tell a Muslim student that he was supporting Donald Trump because he was going to kill all of the Muslims if he became president,” one teacher wrote. Another said, “A boy brought a knife to school to protect himself against ‘the Muslims.’ His teacher had to move her Muslim students away from him for their safety.”
Even the very youngest students were included in the report. “All Muslims are bad,” one first-grader told his teacher.
“A child of Indian heritage introduced himself to me, all in a single breath, ‘Hi, I’m Fharid but I’m not a terrorist,'” a teacher wrote. “He was six.”
As usual, there’s no liberal or leftist label for the SPLC, despite its long-running war on the "radical right" and their "hate crimes." Founder Morris Dees touts his work as finance director for the 1972 George McGovern campaign and the 1976 Jimmy Carter campaign..
